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Robert Lipsyte: Skeptic in the Press Box

Lipsyte at an Emile Griffith-Nino Benvenuti title fight at Shea Stadium in 1967.Credit
Barton Silverman, from “An Accidental Sportswriter”

A 19-year-old aspiring novelist and native New Yorker just out of Columbia University, Robert Lipsyte had never bought a copy of The New York Times until he decided to look in the classifieds for a summer job before graduate school. He found one at the paper itself, as a copy boy in the sports department in 1957, though he had little interest or experience in sports. In junior high, he was a self-­described nerd and “became a particular target of the bullies because I compulsively talked back and was too fat to run away afterward.”

On his first day at The Times, he nearly stopped the presses with a screw-up, winningly depicted in his rambling, opinionated and ultimately likable new memoir, “An Accidental Sportswriter”: he failed to place a rolled sheath of edited copy in a canister before slipping it into the pneumatic tube to be transported to another floor, leaving the papers stuck in transit. Much newsroom profanity ensued. The constipation of the sports copy on this occasion mirrored the writing of its reporters, according to Lipsyte, who recalls the section then as “at best mediocre, perhaps by design,” clogged with “the faux Homeric mythmaking of rosy-fingered Arthur Daley” and “the plodding game detail” of the baseball writers. (The exception to these second-rate types was Gay Talese, who rightly receives such reverence here that Lipsyte’s book should come shrink-wrapped with Talese’s recent collection of sportswriting, “The Silent Season of a Hero.”)

Lipsyte also became lovingly stuck at The Times, primarily in two stints as a sports columnist, long enough to see the tubes replaced by electronic communications and the “godding up” of athletes superseded by gimlet-eyed criticism. He made such criticism his signature drink, railing against what he first called SportsWorld (the title of an early book), and later, Jock Culture. Storming the ramparts of sport’s prevailing conservatism, chauvinism and hypocrisy would be his constant — and some would say constantly tiresome — theme.

He was fortunate to hit his stride in the 1960s, when sports and social consciousness were beginning to overlap. In one of his first big triumphs at the paper, he was assigned a sidebar on the second Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight, in 1963, and he tracked down Malcolm X at a rally in Brooklyn to ask him “what he thought the fight signified.” When Malcolm brushed off his query as “a stupid question,” Lipsyte, after being knocked to the curb by a security detail, retorted, “The only stupid question is an unanswered question!” This challenge drew a response from Malcolm — “I’m pleased to see that the two best men in the sport are black. But they’ll be exploited, of course, and the promoters will get all the bread” — that made the story. The next year, when the senior writers were clustering around the Liston camp, assuming he would destroy the loudmouth Cassius Clay, Lipsyte won Clay’s beat as his own, through the name change to Muhammad Ali and beyond.

The most fascinating of the early assignments recounted here is a collaboration with the controversial comedian Dick Gregory on his autobiography. At first, even the liberal Lipsyte found Gregory’s tirades about white supremacy wearying, but the writer located an initial source of that anger in a high school sports snub: Gregory, a track star, set a St. Louis rec­ord in the mile in 1951, but was denied acknowledgment in the annual city year­book because he was black. Lipsyte writes, “Being with Greg in those tumultuous years of 1963 and 1964 informed the rest of my career.” That career — not only as a New York Times sportswriter, but as a freelancer, a successful young adult novelist and a television interviewer — has been filled with marquee names like Mickey Mantle and Billie Jean King, whom he calls “the most important sports figure of the 20th century,” for her feminism as well as for leading “the revolution that had overthrown the most oppressive concept in sports, amateurism.”

Ali gets two chapters here, and Howard Cosell a long one, but their portraits are less enlightening than those of the less famous characters. On assignment to interview Bill Walton of the Portland Trail Blazers and his housemate Jack Scott, Lipsyte is more engaged by Scott, “the guru of jock liberation,” as Spiro Agnew sneeringly called him. Scott was a former star athlete, an academic and a counterculture figure who eventually got involved with Patty Hearst. He becomes “the main focus of the piece,” and Lipsyte describes, during that week in Oregon, skinny-­dipping in a nearby stream and being “baked by a noonday sun and the fat joint I was sharing with the subject of my story.”

Other chapters — for example, one on gay athletes like the high school football player Corey Johnson, and another on the Onondaga tribal chief and former Syracuse lacrosse star Oren Lyons — are sensitive portrayals of those on the margins of sport, marred only by Lipsyte’s spasms of righteous rage. At the end of the chapter on gay athletes, he fumes about the lack of follow-up to his original articles: “I was disgusted . . . by the mainstream sports media’s refusal to take these stories seriously.” Once he even resorts to a weak Palinism, referring to “the lamestream sports media.”

If Lipsyte is often his own best promoter, prone to grandstanding (like announcing his resignation from a brief job at The New York Post on TV), he also, to his credit, gives his critics full voice, particularly the broadcaster Bob Costas, who told Lipsyte he wanted him to be “less corrosive; skeptical, not cynical.” And he’s hardest on himself when he fails to back up his own daughter’s desire to start a soccer team at her school under Title IX provisions: “In retrospect, I feel ashamed. And stupid. What a chance to put into practice all that abstract reporting, that pose of liberated macho, make a fuss, challenge the school, create a soccer team. Be useful.”

No starry-eyed nostalgist, he is astute in assessing the changing relationship between sportswriters and athletes in the Internet age, best exemplified by ESPN’s “Sports Guy,” the best-selling author Bill Simmons. After first being “appalled” that Simmons is so solipsistic, he is eventually won over by the humor and cleverness of his writing and finally gets what he calls “the Tao of Bill”: “The essence of the game is our response to it, not the game itself. Players are not necessarily human since, as the gap between us and them widens, they become archetypes in our minds. Besides, reporters with media passes are not getting access either; their ‘inside knowledge’ is the gossip they churn among themselves.”

“An Accidental Sportswriter” is a messy book, full of recrimination and fulmination, pride and envy, contradiction and questioning. But when you least expect it, all of the messiness slips away, in the clarity of the final chapter: a lovely, straightforward valedictory for his father, an independent centenarian who died in 2005 after a long career as a public school teacher and administrator. What Lipsyte discovers as he “reports” on his father’s life brings together what he has learned in more than 50 years as a writer, and in the end Sidney Lipsyte becomes more memorable in these pages than Muhammad Ali.

AN ACCIDENTAL SPORTSWRITER

A Memoir

By Robert Lipsyte

Illustrated. 246 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.

Jay Jennings is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City.”

A version of this review appears in print on June 26, 2011, on page BR28 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Skeptic in the Press Box. Today's Paper|Subscribe